In 2000 or thereabouts PacBell was promising ADSL at my apartment. I was well within range of the CO/DSLAM and everything seemed set but the technician could not get the modem to sync with a signal. Turned out the building's phone wiring was a rat's nest of twisted and taped RJ-11.

It really sucked not to get anything faster than dial-up. It also explained why my dial-up couldn't connect reliably at 28k and I'd often be stuck with a 19k connection.

The experience did teach me a lot about Squid as a caching proxy and using wget and screen to do overnight downloads (I didn't learn about whey's background flag until a few years later).